In which our series on landscape and capitalism continues with two of the
greatest journeys taken in halfway recent British cinema, even though "great",
like with Britain itself, may be a misleading attribute: neither of the films
ever leaves the British Isles (apart from a minute that Robinson spends in
Lille, while his partner waits for him in Calais), and neither of the journeys
ever really sets or reaches a destination. This is minor cinema at its finest,
inventing two highly idiosyncratic research projects undertaken by two highly
unlikely protagonist couples who, even though their pace, methods and areas of
interest differ rather substantially (a meandering experiment in language,
ethnography and music in one case, a fast-paced zigzag course through history,
politics and literature in the other), will cross paths more than once, and
whose findings, however obscure, may occasionally even resonate with each other.